The wrong hymn sheet

How priests suspended by the Russian Orthodox Church are paying the price for preaching peace

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has ostracised dozens of its priests for taking a vocal anti-war stance since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago, and its intolerance of dissent has in some cases led priests to turn to the Patriarchate of Constantinople to pursue their religious calling outside Russia.

Father Vadim Kuzmitsky moved from his native Belarus to the village of Akhtuba, in Russia’s southern Volgograd region, in 2012. He remembers feeling that he had come to a free European country, as, at the time, newspapers felt able to criticise Vladimir Putin, who had just returned to the presidency after four years as prime minister. However, he quickly came to understand that rather than being a fledgling democracy, Russia was in fact playing catch-up with Belarus.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 coincided with the first week of Lent, a period when Russian Orthodox churches hold services every day, and Father Vadim realised that he had no choice but to address the war in his sermons.

He also quickly understood that being a churchgoer and a believer was “no defence against propaganda”, and that while his parishioners may have listened to him in the moment and agreed with what he was saying, “then they’d go home, turn on the TV, and the next day they’d be talking about ‘our boys liberating our brother Ukrainians from Nazis’”.

Senior clergy attempted to isolate him, asking him why his opinion of the “special military operation” didn’t “tally with that of the patriarch”, to which he responded that he was an adult and that “no old man” would make up his mind for him “no matter how beautiful his headgear”.

Soon, it wasn’t just church elders showing an interest in Father Vadim. Uniformed police officers began coming to his services, followed by their plain-clothes colleagues, to hear exactly what he was saying.

He held his last official service on 12 June 2022, Trinity Sunday and Russia Day. The Volgograd diocese had recommended he move elsewhere in the country, but understanding that he would have to make similar compromises in any other Russian diocese too, he bid farewell to his flock and drove himself across the border to Georgia the following day.

Star crossed

As a passionate lover of astronomy, Father Vladimir Korolyov always tries to turn the conversation to the stars, and even used to teach astronomy at the Sunday school he ran at the church in the central Russian city of Tula he served at, where he would always refer to it as “the most important science”.

When the war began, Korolyov refused to collect money for the war effort from his parishioners, an offence for which he was ultimately dismissed after devoting over a decade of his life to the church. Since his departure, pupils at the Sunday school he created have been making camouflage nets for the Russian military, causing some anti-war parents to remove their children and leave the parish.

“The life of every person is an invaluable and unique gift of God, and we therefore wish for all soldiers — both Russian and Ukrainian — to return to their homes and families unharmed.”

Father Vladimir recalls the events of 24 February 2022 very clearly as he’d been discharged from the cardiology department of his local hospital the day beforehand.

“I was hale and hearty when I got home, ready to get on with my life, but what do you know! When it all kicked off the next morning, I had heart trouble again and couldn’t sleep. It was like I hadn’t been treated at all.”

Korolyov had been one of the first priests to sign an open letter appealing for reconciliation and an end to the war that appeared online on 1 March 2022, and which had gained the signatures of 293 ROC clergy members in a matter of weeks.

“The life of every person is an invaluable and unique gift of God, and we therefore wish for all soldiers — both Russian and Ukrainian — to return to their homes and families unharmed,” the appeal reads.

In early April, Father Vladimir was summoned to the regional office of the country’s notorious Federal Security Service. Though he could easily have been Father Vladimir’s son, a young man dressed in a white shirt and wearing a tie threatened to send him to the front line, saying it could easily be arranged.

Father Vladimir was dismissed on 1 December 2022, after which he left Russia carrying a single rucksack and now lives in an “eastern European country”, where he continues his ministry by serving in that country’s own Orthodox church.

Trouble brewing

This is the second year Father Vadim has spent in the city of Batumi, on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, where he lives with his elderly mother and teenage daughter, his wife having refused to join them when they moved here from Russia. As Father Vadim is no longer able to serve in the Russian Orthodox church, he now earns a living brewing beer.

Brewing has become a Kuzmitsky family business during their short amount of time in Batumi: while Father Vadim brews and bottles the beer, his brother, who left Belarus after the 2020 anti-Lukashenko protests, goes from bar to bar in the city trying to sell it. “Money is tight, of course, but we’re not on the street either,” he says.

What bothers him most is that he can’t do his job. As a parishioner, Kuzmitsky attends the only church in Batumi where the service is conducted in Church Slavonic, the Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in much of Eastern Europe. Having befriended the priest, Kuzmitsky began assisting him during church services and even taking confessions from the Russian-speaking parishioners.

However, that suddenly all ended after a letter arrived from Russia. “The brothers from the Volgograd diocese wrote that I was banned from conducting services and should not even be allowed near the altar.”

Another sanction the ROC has at its disposal is banning a priest who leaves one church but still hasn’t found a new parish within three months from conducting church services. “Patriarch Kirill brought that rule in so that the serfs wouldn’t change their master too often,” Kuzmitsky comments wryly.

Having devoted half his life to the church only to wind up being a brewer in Georgia, Father Vadim understandably refers to his current state as an existential crisis, and says that his sole remaining chance to continue with his calling would involve transferring his allegiance to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and serving in countries with a Russian-speaking diaspora.

Changing teams

As one priest who asked not to be named described the process told Novaya Europe, “changing teams” is the only realistic option for most Russian priests who have been banned from their ministry by the ROC, and this can only be done by switching allegiance to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which due to a ruling dating from the 5th century, has the power to overrule decisions made by other branches of Orthodoxy that it deems to be unfair.

The ideological chasm between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Russian Orthodox Church today can be summed up by comparing the most recent Easter sermons delivered by its respective church heads. While Bishop Bartholomew prayed that “long-suffering Ukraine would find peace” and for the exchange of prisoners of war, Patriarch Kirill asked the Lord “to protect the sacred borders of our land” and to pray for “the authorities and the army”.

However, before an ROC priest can switch allegiance to another branch of Orthodoxy, he is first required to officially separate from Moscow, a move that can only be completed with Patriarch Kirill’s say so, even if the ROC has already suspended the priest from his ministry. This rule gives Patriarch Kirill great leverage, and no priest who has been the cause of a scandal within the ROC is likely to be allowed to leave to cause trouble elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Patriarch Kirill’s closeness to several Russian oligarchs, including Konstantin Malofeyev, the founder of the ultraconservative Orthodox propaganda channel Tsargrad, allows him to wield considerable influence over Patriarch Bartholomew, even if he has no power over him on paper.

Turkish officials with influence over the Patriarchate of Constantinople strive to avoid confrontation with Moscow, and for that reason, the patriarchate proceeds with caution as it reviews the cases of disgraced priests.

Go in peace

Russian singer-songwriter Pavel Fakhrtdinov came up with the idea of providing support to Russian priests who have come out against the war as he sat in his kitchen in the German city of Wuppertal one day. Shortly beforehand, his friend and fellow Russian in exile, Father Valerian Dunin-Barkovsky, had told him stories about the priests he knew in Russia who were being persecuted for their anti-war stance.

“When this horror is over, people will ask: ‘Where was the church all this time?’ And the historians will say: ‘See, not everybody in the church supported the war.’”

As many priests lack non-ecclesiastical training and skills they can easily fall back on for work, those banned from holding positions in the ROC can quickly be reduced to penury along with their families, which are often very large. It was with precisely such people in mind that Fakhrtdinov and Father Valerian founded the Peace Unto All foundation.

Peace Unto All, which currently supports all the priests interviewed for this article, also offers practical advice and legal assistance to clerics both inside and outside Russia. “There is just one condition,” says Fakhrtdinov, “they must have openly opposed the war and been persecuted for it.”

For Fakhrtdinov, creating the foundation has been his own attempt to restore the good name of the Orthodox Church despite its outspoken support for the war in Ukraine and the obsequiousness on display from Patriarch Kirill before Vladimir Putin. “When this horror is over, people will ask: ‘Where was the church all this time?’ And the historians will say: ‘See, not everybody in the church supported the war.’”